Mining Sector Can Pull 100m Nigerians Out Of Poverty – Report

The Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and the Ford Foundation recently released a documentary and diagnostics report on Nigeria’s mining governance, landscape and prospects.

Underscoring opportunities for growth, the sector is projected to drive the government’s diversification agenda at a scale capable of supporting the pulling of 100 million Nigerians out of poverty by 2030, according to the report.

A minerals-abundant nation, Nigeria is endowed with over 40 different solid mineral types found in about 450 locations scattered across the country.

“The current state of the sector, however, is not appealing,” both organisations said in a statement. The sector contributes meagerly to the nation’s overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP), at 0.5 per cent (2018), performing unsatisfactorily compared to some of its solid mineral resource-rich African counterparts.

The report analyses the domestication of the African Mining Vision (AMV); a further review of the legal and institutional framework that allows for a more productive intergovernmental coordination framework for the sector and engender sector competitiveness; small scale and artisanal mining; improved system for data collection and aggregation to help support trade and investment facilitation in the mining sector.

The diagnostic report takes a look at the issues related to unlocking the potentials of development minerals and identifies strategies for focusing the Nigerian Solid Minerals sector on driving the country’s energy transition programme in response to global warming.

The report attributed several factors for the  grim performance, such as– widespread illegal mining due to a weak regulatory environment at the federal and state government as well as infrastructural challenges.

Other issues include insufficient funding, high risk associated with mining, health & environmental hazard, inadequate geological data, ill-equipped laboratory and policy inconsistency.

For a country like Nigeria, sector governance issues such as lack of clarity and weak intergovernmental framework for addressing minerals ownership and control issues – contribute to the sector’s woes, both firms said.

Nigeria’s employment-generation potential is also far from being realised, given its contribution of 0.3 per cent to national employment and 0.2 per cent to total export.

NESG said addressing these issues is essential to move the sector’s contribution to GDP towards the five  per cent target of the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development in the short term.

“Although there are several strategies to contain these issues, the need for actors to cocreate adaptive and pragmatic solutions that deliver Nigeria’s development ambitions, leveraging the sector’s potentials, has become an urgent imperative,” it stated.

Premised on that, NESG and the Ford Foundation worked on a diagnostics report and documentary on Nigeria’s mining governance, landscape and prospects to help resolve the sector’s governance and regulatory bottlenecks, focusing on specific areas such as minerals control and ownership, institutional strengthening, investment environments and minerals codes and standardisation.

“Exploring these two dimensions in the solid minerals optimisation discourse is essential because they directly connect to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The expanded focus on development minerals and energy transition provides a clear pathway to achieving a more economically secure Nigeria,” it stated.

The diagnostics report takes a look at the Nigerian solid minerals industry and what needs to be done to transform it into an economically viable sector.

The solid minerals industry is one of the potential employment-generating sectors with a vast capacity to bridge government’s revenue gaps, promote inclusive growth and supporting economic structural transformation.